Gaming Confessions & Blasphemy

I HATED Alex from HL2

I can't say if it was the implication I was suppose to care about her, despite having no real reason to, or the fact that any time she was with me on the mission I didn't get to choose the play-style thanks to her "aggro everything and die" tactics.

Although I love RPGs--no matter the setting, as long as they have a good story, interesting characters and meaningful choices--, there are a few canonical series that I've never gotten into. It's probably no coincidence that I was introduced to all of them late into their iterations.

1. I've never played an Ultima game. Unless you count IX, which I for played 20 minutes and promptly uninstalled. I bought VII on gog.com a while back but have yet to try it.

2. The only Final Fantasy game I've ever played is XIII. I did not finish it. I may go back to it some day. Right when I hit the part where the world finally opens up (25 hours in!), I ran out of steam.

3. The only Wizardry game I've ever played is 8. I did not finish it. I played about two hours and thought it was stupid.

IUMogg wrote:

Burnout Paradise is one of the most disappointing games of this generation Again a game I don't understand the love for. They took a great series and ruined it.

I never played any burnout game prior to Burnout and at the time I was looking for a more modern arcadey racing game than the 1999 NFS: High Stakes (it has pretty good fan support with patching for modern systems and additions) and Project Gotham Racing 2. It fit the bill perfectly when the 360 pad on my PC worked flawlessly with the game's full game world demo and the game went on sale the next week. It worked great as an arcade racer that added an open world you got to explore which was a totally new concept to me that I had never seen in another racing game. I loved it for what it was, not for what the rest of the series had been.

Now, if they would only marry the Project Gotham style of races with the courses defined by barriers and some of those courses have overlap as it's just using the same street map with different routes, and the ability to roam the entirety of the world until you want to do one of those races. Taking any path you wanted in the races in Paradise City were cool, but having a set route with boundaries would be nice, too.

Scratched wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

I hate bunny-hopping in multiplayer games with a fiery passion
It doesn't require any skill or tactics, you're just mashing a button and hoping that lag and/or faulty hit-detection works out in your favour. I don't care if people think that "everyone else does it" or "it's part of the game", any time I see a bunch of soldiers/wizards/space marines bouncing around like over-caffeinated kangaroos it fills me with rage. I applaud any game that tries to reduce this crap through things like aim penalties and stamina bars.

For anything that's trying to be even remotely realistic, sure, but when you look at something like Quake3, where it's not just mashing the space bar but part of a varied skillset that makes up movement and map knowledge, it really is a good high level skill. That said, it's the kind of thing from a different era, or you might even say sub-genre of shooters which doesn't get made any more.

I'm not talking about skilled jumping like the crazy stuff people do in games like Quake3, that kind of thing can be very impressive. My ire is directed at the idiots that mash the spacebar any time they get into a fight in order to make themselves harder to hit.

CptGlanton wrote:

I didn't like Bastion. I didn't think the art style or voice work was particularly interesting, but the gameplay was downright bad. I gave up maybe halfway through and never looked back.

Agreed, agreed, a thousand times agreed.

Aaron D. wrote:

Of course that doesn't account for a game you pay full price for only to have it not click with you and sit on your shelf after a couple/few hours of play.

Exactly. To help with this, all games need to have a free demo.

Not just a rendered trailer. Not even a gameplay video. Since I basically only play games on Steam now I have no way of returning a game I don't like. I've spent my money on way too many games that turned out to be crap and I'm not going to do it anymore.

Oh yeah, and GET OFF MY LAWN!

muttonchop wrote:
Scratched wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

I hate bunny-hopping in multiplayer games with a fiery passion
It doesn't require any skill or tactics, you're just mashing a button and hoping that lag and/or faulty hit-detection works out in your favour. I don't care if people think that "everyone else does it" or "it's part of the game", any time I see a bunch of soldiers/wizards/space marines bouncing around like over-caffeinated kangaroos it fills me with rage. I applaud any game that tries to reduce this crap through things like aim penalties and stamina bars.

For anything that's trying to be even remotely realistic, sure, but when you look at something like Quake3, where it's not just mashing the space bar but part of a varied skillset that makes up movement and map knowledge, it really is a good high level skill. That said, it's the kind of thing from a different era, or you might even say sub-genre of shooters which doesn't get made any more.

I'm not talking about skilled jumping like the crazy stuff people do in games like Quake3, that kind of thing can be very impressive. My ire is directed at the idiots that mash the spacebar any time they get into a fight in order to make themselves harder to hit.

Let's not all start hopping when muttonchop's back is turned in L4D2.

padriec wrote:
Aaron D. wrote:

Of course that doesn't account for a game you pay full price for only to have it not click with you and sit on your shelf after a couple/few hours of play.

Exactly. To help with this, all games need to have a free demo.

Not just a rendered trailer. Not even a gameplay video. Since I basically only play games on Steam now I have no way of returning a game I don't like. I've spent my money on way too many games that turned out to be crap and I'm not going to do it anymore.

Oh yes. It amazes me the amount of companies that complain when their game doesn't sell, and also the amount of companies that whine that demos take too many resources to make. It's a marketing expense.

I loved everything about Infamous and Infamous 2 and I don't understand why people don't like them.

I can understand not liking the original as much after playing 2, as it was a pretty hefty upgrade for the series (like if I restart playing Assassin's Creed, I'm starting at 2, not the original)... but yeah, I loved this series. The story was great, good bit of sandbox fun, powers were great. I WILL say that going for 100% on achievements for the first also very much sucked becuase of two. All blast shards was a pain because I missed one on the huuuuuge tower near the blast site and didn't realize there was a vertical range on finding shards. The other killer was killing guys from a moving train. It really does move TOO fast for anything other than sniping to work when you get into slowmo and even then it's hard (Even on easy mode) because that train rocks like nothing else. :X

I played quite a few hours of The Witcher 2 and gave up. I have heard so much talk about how it's a "mature" RPG and a massive step up over dumbed-down games like Mass Effect. Rubbish. The writing was awful; every character's dialogue was interchangeable with every other's. When I died during a boss fight, and the game backed me up past the two 'mob/trash' fights before the boss, I turned it off for good.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:
CptGlanton wrote:

MilkmanDanimal is a bad person who is wrong about things.

THERE IS NO LINK BETWEEN THE TWO ABOVE STATEMENTS AT ALL.

EXCEPT FOR THE FACT THAT BOTH ARE TRUE STATEMENTS.

I don't really care about indie games
I don't not-care for them either. Like music, it's progressed past just meaning 'independent of a publisher' now and games from any old developer who slaps the 'indie' label on themselves seem to get a free pass with a lot of people.

All this negativity towards The Witcher 2 is pleasing me. I adored the first one, and the second one fell completely flat for me. I even gave it a second chance a few months ago and quit just an hour past where I quit previously. Glad to see I'm not alone.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Call of Duty is ruining the FPS genre. They're actually well crafted games but their insistence on the "Bro, f*ck yeah military!" mentality is awful and the insane success of this series has turned almost every FPS into another bland, generic military bravado simulator that's devoid of any creative soul. I think the series should exist but I wish it was just a subset of a wider selection of FPS games. I love FPS games but am so sick to death of modern military junk.

I actually think that the concepts built into CoD4 has become stale. I think its popularity has rippled into other FPSes making them way too similar. The whole XP systems and look and feel is becoming the more bog standard FPS.

Confessions:

I probably spend more time reading about games than playing them.

Also, I collect (good) games.

My pile is staggering. I only buy when games are on super-sale, so I have spent much less than the typical gamer for my collection. It's still enormous! Some of my purchases are catching up with great games from the far- and near-past that I missed; some are atonement for my past; some are semi-recent games on sale. All of them I have either played or plan to play someday.

I'd need to quit my job -- and sleep, probably -- and play constantly for a year to clear my Steam and GOG backlogs.

muttonchop wrote:

I'm not talking about skilled jumping like the crazy stuff people do in games like Quake3, that kind of thing can be very impressive. My ire is directed at the idiots that mash the spacebar any time they get into a fight in order to make themselves harder to hit.

I used to love these people in Halo. They'd jump, make it harder for themselves to aim, and force themselves into a nice straightforward arc with a super predictable crest. Made headshots incredibly easy. Or you just shoot enough to pop their shields and melee their legs for an easy kill. Also great fun.

I'm not sure that holds in the new Halo games though, as they've sped things up significantly.

I don't really like the Zelda games.
I've played a heavily guided hour of the SNES title, and an hour of the first one on the Wii, and didn't care for it at all.

I don't like games that take >10 hours to play.
My current exception to this was Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. While I absolutely loved it, I gave up on the story about 1/3 of the way through my first run, and proceeded to listen to George RR Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series.

I hate getting lost in games. If there isn't some kind of clear indicator of where I'm supposed to go, I'm not interested.

I hated the audio for Skyrim so much I pushed my husband to using a headset so I didn't have to hear it anymore.

I've loved Halo since my younger brother got me to play King of the Hill matches in Halo: Combat Evolved, and have already invested 10 hours in Halo 4.

I hate the handholding our entire hobby has turned to. Pong never told us "move to the left to rebound the ball".

I hate achievements. I'm not so desperate for attention that I need to be congratulated for pressing start. Devs: If you want an instant sale regardless of ANY other part of your game, put in an option to disable achievements. My $60 is instantly yours.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate achievements. I'm not so desperate for attention that I need to be congratulated for pressing start. Devs: If you want an instant sale regardless of ANY other part of your game, put in an option to disable achievements. My $60 is instantly yours.

I've been playing a lot more stuff on PC lately and as a result, finally breaking the unhealthy habit of low-hanging fruit 360 achievements but yeah, I always said that if the consoles gave an option to just opt out of achievements (including deleting your history of them), I would totally do it. I'd even pay a few bucks to do so. Unfortunately, achievements are metrics for publishers (which was always their original intent) which is why every platform now has them (even WiiU's going to). They're sadly not going anywhere.

But if you turn off achievements, you miss the best joke in Portal 2.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate the handholding our entire hobby has turned to. Pong never told us "move to the left to rebound the ball".

Along with the player training point, I think this kind of thing shows a lack of trust in the player, and the direction some developers want to move, towards linear games where you're just cranking a mechanism to progress.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate achievements. I'm not so desperate for attention that I need to be congratulated for pressing start. Devs: If you want an instant sale regardless of ANY other part of your game, put in an option to disable achievements. My $60 is instantly yours.

Intrinsic versus extrinsic rewarding. I think achievements have some role to play, and people will always find a way to measure and compare e-peens so it gives them one (may as well cater to them), but there is a lot of putting the cart before the horse. I think it would be an interesting playtest experiment if achievements were disabled, but the tester was meant to be at least aware of how to get them naturally through the game, without the to-do list.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate the handholding our entire hobby has turned to. Pong never told us "move to the left to rebound the ball".

Equivalent complexities:
IMAGE(http://www.arcade-museum.com/images/118/118124215260.png)

IMAGE(http://alexandria.rpgclassics.com/PS2/finalfantasy10/finalfantasy10_3.gif)

I hate when I don't know what to do in a game.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate the handholding[i] our entire hobby has turned to. Pong never told us "move to the left to rebound the ball".

Handholding or nose leading?

I don't particularly like open world games. There are an obvious few caveats.
I'd much rather be lead by the nose through a great story or even a setting which creates a feeling.
In open world games, I get side tracked by something mundane, and loose the main story line. It takes incredible will power, as I've done lately, to DO NO SIDE QUESTS, so that I stand a chance of finishing a game. In most open games, I then feel like I've missed things, and the satiation at the end is somehow diminished.

Now, the caveat.
Something like Fallout 3, I just want to play around in that world. I still lost the main plot, and missed things, but I love the setting so much that it didn't matter. I made my own story. I have much more trouble doing this in a world where I'm not keenly interested in the setting and theme.

Minecraft is the other anomaly. It's more like sculpting, drawing, or perhaps playing with lego. You just start the right brain and let it go. And on top of it, in order to build up resources for building, the mining is like knitting, or some other busywork that keeps your hands moving. Mining is just somehow relaxing, and you can throw in the odd cave exploration.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Unfortunately, achievements are metrics for publishers (which was always their original intent) which is why every platform now has them (even WiiU's going to).

No, it's not. Nintendo thinks system-wide achievement systems are dumb and restrictive and refuses to implement them. They have achievements in individual titles (Kid Icarus: Uprising has the best achievement system I've ever seen), but no, the Wii U as a whole will not have anything like a Gamer Score or trophy shelf.

muttonchop wrote:
Scratched wrote:
muttonchop wrote:

I hate bunny-hopping in multiplayer games with a fiery passion
It doesn't require any skill or tactics, you're just mashing a button and hoping that lag and/or faulty hit-detection works out in your favour. I don't care if people think that "everyone else does it" or "it's part of the game", any time I see a bunch of soldiers/wizards/space marines bouncing around like over-caffeinated kangaroos it fills me with rage. I applaud any game that tries to reduce this crap through things like aim penalties and stamina bars.

For anything that's trying to be even remotely realistic, sure, but when you look at something like Quake3, where it's not just mashing the space bar but part of a varied skillset that makes up movement and map knowledge, it really is a good high level skill. That said, it's the kind of thing from a different era, or you might even say sub-genre of shooters which doesn't get made any more.

I'm not talking about skilled jumping like the crazy stuff people do in games like Quake3, that kind of thing can be very impressive. My ire is directed at the idiots that mash the spacebar any time they get into a fight in order to make themselves harder to hit.

Bah, I was going to post some links to prove you wrong
Here you go anyway 1, 2, 3

Ghostship wrote:

I don't particularly like open world games. There are an obvious few caveats.
I'd much rather be lead by the nose through a great story or even a setting which creates a feeling.
In open world games, I get side tracked by something mundane, and loose the main story line. It takes incredible will power, as I've done lately, to DO NO SIDE QUESTS, so that I stand a chance of finishing a game. In most open games, I then feel like I've missed things, and the satiation at the end is somehow diminished.

There's a good few games that would be better more tightly constrained and focused.

Mafia2 is the best example I can think of where it seemed the big world was just where they said "we might as well, we're creating all this scenery", but leaving it open also showed how empty as a world it was, with little extra content. Compare Mafia2's world against any of the GTAs after 2, where there's plenty of stuff to do and systems to work to keep it interesting.

Possibly Red Faction Guerilla too, but destruction.

Aaron D. wrote:
stryk187 wrote:

2. Chrono Trigger

Best soundtrack ever, bar none, this is a non-debatable fact.

Hey look everyone...someone hasn't played No One Lives Forever. :p

AH! You're right I had forgotten how good the music in NOLF was. Still I like Chrono Trigger 16-bit scores better, but NOLF had a great soundtrack as well, absolutely! Damn thanks for reminding me about NOLF, I think I have 1&2 around here somewhere, I wonder if they will run on Win7 x64.

SixteenBlue wrote:

I hate when I don't know what to do in a game.

Seconded, and especially for any first or third person games from the last ten years. I don't think there's a good excuse for this problem other than bad level design. If I spend five minutes wandering around without a clear task or objective and the game isn't open-world, I get bored. If it goes on longer, I'm risking ruining the game by trying to find the right section of a guide/walkthrough to get unstuck without spoiling too much of the game.

1. I thought The Witcher was terribly boring. I hated the combat and thought it had way too many systems and menus in it. I played the first 2 hours and gave up.

2. I liked Dragon Age II better than Dragon Age Origins. I hated having to constantly micro manage my group in Origins and it became tedious to me.

3. The older I get the less I like multiplayer gaming and would rather sit down with a good story single player game. I feel like I don't have time to game nearly as much as I want to and that my skill level in competitive multiplayer games has suffered because of it. Also I am an extremely competitive person by nature so most of the time when I'm playing competitive multiplayer I'm stressed the max. Lately I've taken a step back and realized that spending my time constantly getting pissed during multiplayer games isn't really having fun. I've also realized how many really good single player games I've missed out on because I was too busy constantly playing multiplayer.

ibdoomed wrote:

I hate achievements. I'm not so desperate for attention that I need to be congratulated for pressing start.

I hate achievements that are as pointless as you describe. I can see value in actual specific challenge-based achievements - do thing X Y times in Z minutes and so on. Simple completion checkpoints and the like, though, are worthless.